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No self-respecting Irish soul in the entire Bay Area was going to be sleeping in Saturday morning. Not on St. Paddy’s Day. Not when places like O’Flaherty’s Irish Pub in downtown San Jose were open for business, serving up Irish breakfasts, 52 beers on tap and live rugby on the pub’s TVs.
“You get a real feeling of family in a pub,” which is why Jason Gorman, originally from County Offaly, was standing at the bar just after 9 a.m., nursing a pint, cheering on Ireland over England, his Irish eyes smiling. “If you want a job, you go to the pub,” he said. “If you want to know what’s going on, you go to the pub. If you want a date, you go the pub.”
And if you wanted to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in San Jose, you showed up here just like Gorman, 44, a Santa Clara County parks maintenance worker, and his pal Keith Brophy, who grew up next door to Gorman back in Tullamore in the Irish midlands.
In the East Bay, the proud burg of Dublin lived up to its name again this year, hosting the city’s 39th annual St. Patrick’s Day weekend festivities that started Friday night and continued on Saturday, with its St. Patrick’s Day Parade moving through downtown.
Meanwhile across the Bay, the 67th annual San Francisco St. Patrick’s Day Parade and Festival was expected to draw more than 5,000 people, making it easily the largest St. Patty’s Day event in the region.
At O’Flaherty’s, the Irish-loving San Francisco Bay Area’s favorite day on the calendar got started bright and early. On an otherwise sleepy North San Pedro Street Saturday morning, the green balloons hanging like a latex necklace around the front door at No. 25 were a dead giveaway. Inside, all hell was breaking loose as a full house watched Ireland nail a grand slam by trouncing England in the Six Nations rugby finale.
“Watching Ireland beat England on St. Paddy’s Day — this is what we live for,” said Brophy, who came to the United States 21 year ago and also works for the county. His team’s historic 24-15 victory over its arch-rival was pure heaven, he said: “The Irish will be celebrating this for a week — assuming they’re awake!”
Surrounded by the 16-year-old pub’s barroom memorabilia shipped to California from Ireland, celebrants showed up early to toast their own Irish-American roots — or those Irish-American roots they wish to God they had been born with.
“St. Patrick’s Day to me means a celebration of drinking,” said Desiree Velez, a 30-year-old administrator at San Jose State University who’d be hard-pressed to claim even a strand of Irishness in her DNA but who was here to watch the rugby alongside her honorary Irish relations. “My niece was born on St. Patrick’s Day so we celebrate together every year.”
And not just the two of them, said Velez, sitting near the bar. “My whole family’s coming — two brothers, one sister, friends and family, 20 of us all together,” a real mash-up of Mexican-Americans in touch with their inner Irish.
That was just little ol’ San Pedro Street. But the entire Bay Area was buzzing this weekend with Irish celebration: Rosie McCann’s Irish Pub on Santana Row was putting on Irish music by the Kavanaugh Brothers, face-painting for the kids and a bagpiper. Molly Magee’s over in Mountain View on Castro Street was serving up great music, hat and jewelry giveaways and Smithwick’s imported Irish ale, along with a slew of Beer Blends like Fat Tire and Guinness. Elsewhere, events large and small unfolded, including The Tenth Annual St. Patty’s Day Alley Party at Taverna Aventine in San Francisco.
The Irish are practically woven into the social fabric of the Bay Area. Ever since the first wave of immigrants came to California, fleeing political unrest during Ireland’s struggle for independence from England, one generation after another has grown up in Oakland, San Francisco and everywhere in between. And they’ve celebrated their heritage every step of the way.
Irish-Americans created businesses during the Gold Rush and prospered in the region, helping to build San Francisco’s infrastructure and becoming powerful political leaders. With the Gold Rush, the city’s Irish population grew to 4,200 in 1852 and by 1880 that number had swelled to more than 30,000 or 37 percent of San Francisco’s population, according to Mary McCloy, a certified guide in the city’s Tour Guide Guild. And St. Paddy’s Day, of course, was always front and center.
“The Archdiocese of San Francisco would suspend Lent restrictions on March 17th each year,” writes McCloy, whose grandparents had come from Ireland. “I attended St. Rose Academy, and we actually had annual Irish/Italian Games in which the Red and the Green would compete in volleyball and basketball. At that time people wore their nationalities proudly.”
The Irish, she writes, “helped to establish San Francisco’s infrastructure and transportation. In 1847 Jasper O’Farrell drew up the survey extending the area of San Francisco and making Market Street a wide thoroughfare cutting diagonally through the City….And City Engineer Michael O’Shaughnessy was responsible for the West Portal and Judah Street Tunnels as well as the Hetch Hetchy Dam and the Crystal Springs reservoir that supply the City’s water.”
And the dam that made Hetch Hetchy possible, of course, is named after O’Shaughnessy.
Today, even while California’s Irish-Americans population has dropped to about eight percent, its member still keep the flame lit, with groups like the United Irish Cultural Center in San Francisco sponsoring events year-round.
There’s also the Crossroads Irish-American Festival, founded in 2004 as way of promoting “the discovery and understanding of the Irish experience in the Americas” as a way to preserve Irish culture, history and arts in the Bay Area’s Irish-American communities.
Back at O’Flaherty’s, Brophy was getting a wee bit sentimental, as the Irish are wont to do at times: apply just an ounce or two of Guinness and that sentimental Irish heart can get downright wistful.
“Here, today, I feel a camaraderie with my fellow Irish,” said Brophy, drawing on his cigarette on the sidewalk as the rugby game exploded inside. “But tomorrow, it’ll all be gone. Back in Ireland, everyone knows their neighbor, everyone helps each other. But here, it feels like everyone’s a stranger.”
And with that, the joyous barroom crowd of Irish and not-at-all-Irish let out a united and awesome roar.
